14 DAY TRIAL // There’s been a lot of talk on the reasons why Samsung might or might not offer Galaxy S III owners the possibility of upgrading their smartphones to Android 4.4 KitKat.
After numerous delays and no clear timeframe for release, Samsung seems to have found the time to put its engineers to work on the promised KitKat update for Galaxy S III.
Several Samsung officials have confirmed over the last couple of months that the Galaxy S III will eventually receive the highly anticipated Android 4.4 KitKat update, but they quickly backtracked on their initial statements.
This has led us to believe that Samsung does not really intend to upgrade the old Galaxy S III to Android 4.4 KitKat for unknown reasons.
In fact, one of the reasons could be the fact that the Galaxy S III is now more than 18 months old, which doesn’t qualify it for the KitKat update anymore.
According to Google, any device older than 18 months will not receive another major update, so Galaxy S III should not receive the KitKat upgrade if Samsung plans to follow Google’s upgrading policy.
However, when Android 4.4 KitKat was announced, back in October, the Galaxy S III was only 17 months old, which qualified it for the update. That was probably Samsung’s mistake, to confirm that the smartphone would eventually receive the upgrade.
Well, it appears that it took the South Korean company about 7 months to deliver on the promise. Still, we are certain that Galaxy S III owners prefer to receive the update later rather than never.
Hopefully, that “later” is today, as Sprint has confirmed on its support website that Samsung Galaxy S III will receive an Android 4.4 KitKat update beginning May 1.
Sprint only mentions that Galaxy S III owners should be looking for software update L710VPUCND8 when manually checking for the KitKat on their devices.
Speaking of which, we suspect that Android 4.4 KitKat for Galaxy S III will be pushed OTA (over the air) in stages, so it might not be available for all owners at the same time.
We will keep an eye out for any reports on the availability of Android 4.4 KitKat for Samsung Galaxy S III and update the article, so stay tuned.